


The Coffee Maker that Almost Destroyed the Avengers

by BiteMeMarvelCanon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 23:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13177284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiteMeMarvelCanon/pseuds/BiteMeMarvelCanon
Summary: After defeating Ultron, Steve said he would make the new Avengers into a team. He failed.He also said he was home.  He lied.





	The Coffee Maker that Almost Destroyed the Avengers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kelslk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelslk/gifts).



> Written for the 2017 Steggy Secret Santa Exchange on Tumblr.

December 2015, the Avengers facility in upstate New York

Steve rubbed his eyes as he left his room and made his way slowly into the common area. He almost bumped into a Christmas tree that someone had set up in the lounge area. The digital clock above the stove read seven fifteen. Was that seven am or pm? It was dark out, so at this time of year, so close to the shortest day of the year, it could be either morning or evening. He wasn't sure how long he had slept. He had gotten back in the middle of the night (last night?) from a mission with Sam halfway around the world. They had been gone for nearly two weeks. He took a closer look out of the window and saw the hint of a sunrise, concluded it was in fact 7:15 in the morning, and headed into the kitchen itself.

It was quiet. No one else was around, and the kitchen was uncharacteristically tidy. He walked over to the coffee maker, already knowing what he would find there. He removed the empty pot and just stared at it. This was it. This was going to be the last straw. The Avengers, ripped apart over a g.d. pot of coffee.

It had all begun months ago, when he had started training the new team. After Ultron, Thor had left to look for answers to what he had seen in his visions. Banner was AWOL. Tony flitted in and out, never staying either at any of his private homes or with them at the Avengers facility in upstate New York for very long. He had withdrawn from everyone after Ultron, closed off in his own head, maybe in his own guilt.

Tony had been wrong; and worse, he had been reckless. He hadn't considered the effects of his actions on the rest of them. That was on him.

But Steve was the ostensible leader of the Avengers. If the members of the team didn’t trust each other or its decision-making process, that was on him.

With everyone else gone, or having given up on the idea of the Avengers, Steve and Natasha were left to try to mold Wanda, Vision, Sam, and Rhodes into a functional team, the new Avengers.

He had to do a better job at forming a team this time. He had to.

Everyone seemed to assume without question that Steve knew how to take a group of people and turn them into a team. He was Captain America after all; his credentials as a leader were unimpeachable. And if he was honest with himself, without any false modesty, he did have some sort of ability to inspire loyalty in some people. But what no one seemed to realize was that building a team was an entirely different skill, one that he did not necessarily have. He had led the Howling Commandos, but they had already been highly skilled and disciplined soldiers when he met them. He hadn't had to teach them how to be a team. Maybe he was a good judge of character in selecting them, but that was all.

Usually when he faced a tough challenge, his instinct was to fight harder. But there was no way to fight people into being a team.

Natasha was there to help him, but team-building wasn't exactly her forte. She concentrated on teaching the skills of spycraft, and she was very good at what she did. Psychology, manipulation, lying, detecting lies, recruiting, tailing someone, eluding someone who was tailing you. But when she was done teaching them what she knew, she was often off on her own, either working for Fury or on her own missions. Steve didn't know and knew better than to ask. Natasha wasn't all that used to working in a team herself, at least one that she hadn’t chosen.

The first week of training had been…all right, he supposed. For a first week.

He decided they would take a day off from physical exercises and work on strategy. He had them gather in the kitchen to start the session right after breakfast.

He had laid out copies of the material he wanted to cover at the conference table and set up a whiteboard. He had put a pot of coffee on and waited eagerly for his students to arrive. 

One by one they filtered in, got coffee and sat down. 

The complaints had started almost immediately. Natasha took a sip of the coffee and immediately asked him if he was aware that there had been vast improvements in coffee over the last 75 years. 

Rhodes took a drink, coughed, and went to get a glass of water.

Wanda smelled it, stared at it for a while, tasted it carefully, and then pronounced it “barbaric” in a reproachful tone.

Vision didn't drink coffee, or anything, but he took a sample to the lab to analyze.

Sam had winced upon taking a sip and then shaken his head in silent disapproval. 

In a way he wasn't surprised. No one had ever liked his coffee. Not in the 1940s, and not in the 2010s. Well, that wasn't strictly true; there was one person who had claimed to like it, but he still wasn't sure if she had been telling the truth.

****

Steve had developed the habit of getting up early, usually well before everyone else, as a boy. He served at the early Mass for the nuns at St. Cecilia’s. He wished he could say it was a selfless act, but it was the generous breakfast they fed him afterwards that had been his chief motivation.

The serum, as with everything else, had enhanced his tendency to get up early. He needed much less sleep now, and was more likely to be awakened by noises or passing lights than he ever was before.

So he was always the first one up in the morning, and he always put a pot of coffee on for anyone who wanted it. He knew he made it strong; everyone said too strong. The most frequent comparisons were to tar (consistency), cigarette butts (flavor), and Shinola (both). Steve had argued that no one had tasted Shinola, but Dugan said he had on a bet once.

This morning was no different. He was the first one up and in the command tent. He put on some coffee and started writing one of the endless reports that was required after his mission. He supposed that he should have expected that stealing a plane and rescuing the 107th on his own would be the easy part, knowing the army.

Peggy was the second person to come into the tent.

“Good morning, Captain,” she had said with a yawn.

“Good morning, Agent Carter,” he said, jumping to his feet. “Would you like some coffee?”

“I would love some,” she answered, as she sat down heavily a little away from where he had spread out his paperwork. She seemed a little…out of it, like she wasn't fully awake yet.

“I would have figured you for a tea drinker,” he said, as he poured her a cup. 

“Yes, well I suppose that it's an occupational hazard of working with so many Americans. I do enjoy tea, but as I'm not a morning person, I've become quite dependent upon a good cup of coffee.” She was speaking slower than usual, her observation punctuated by yawns.

He handed her the cup, waiting for her critical reaction.

She took a sip, opened her eyes wide for a second, and shook her head a little to get it down.

“You think it's awful, don't you?”

“No, I…”

“Go ahead. You can say it. Everybody does.”

“Well, it is very strong, but i quite like strong coffee, and as I said, it's what I need in the morning. I do like my coffee with quite a bit of milk in it, and that is in short supply. But with milk I think this coffee would be quite excellent,” she said. She seemed to steel herself a little before taking the next gulp, but she managed it without wincing.

Steve knew she was probably bending the truth a little, or a lot. He had thought he couldn't love her anymore than he already did, but he was finding out there was no upper limit on that.

****

2015

The team-building exercise involved putting the group into teams of two. The participants were to imagine that they were in a life or death situation in severe winter weather. One of them would be snow-blind and unable to see, while the other would be frostbitten and unable to move. In order to survive, they would need to work together to put up a tent.

He had given them a few minutes to get started, then walked around the hangar to survey their progress.

He found Wanda lying on the ground, playing the role of the frostbite victim. Rhodes was a little ways away from her, sitting with his eyes closed amid a pile of tent parts.

“What should I do next?” he asked.

“Pick up the pole on your left,” she called. “No, not that pole, the one on your left.”

“That is my left.”

“Well, further to the left, then.”

Rhodes rummaged around on the floor. “This one?”

“No, not that far.”

“Then give me clearer directions.”

“Oh, never mind, it’s this one, right in front of your face,” she said irritably, making one of the tent poles levitate up in the air.

“How are things going?” Steve finally asked, even though it was clear things were not going well at all.

“Oh, just great,” Rhodes answered sourly. 

“He can’t follow simple directions,” Wanda said.

“Maybe you should take a short break and start over,” Steve suggested. “And this time, don’t use telekinesis. That’s not really the point of the exercise.”

Leaving them, he proceeded to Vision and Sam, who were sitting on the floor talking, seemingly not participating in the exercise at all. Vision looked…serene as always. Sam looked exasperated.

“Now, if we were in the Arctic,” Vision was saying, “we shall have to take into account the month of the year, due to the seasonal ice melting.”

“But—“ Sam started to say.

“However, this would not be a concern in the Antarctic,” Vision continued without pausing. 

“I—“ Sam started again.

“If we were in the Himalaya, the severity of the frostbite will likely be exacerbated by the dehydration of the body at altitude. Another consideration is the—“

“How’s your progress?” Steve interrupted, settling into a stance with his hands resting on his utility belt.

“Well, Vision here has been going over all the possible places on the entire earth that a person could get frostbite and snow blindness in.”

“That’s not really the point of the exercise,” Steve observed pointedly.

“Captain, it’s impossible for me to complete this activity if I don’t know all the variables, for example, how long we have until my companion succumbs to frostbite. And I haven’t even begun to consider possible variations in the albedo—”

“Al who?” Sam yelled.

“The albedo is a measure of the fraction of solar energy that is reflected back into space,” Vision explained.

“Steve remind me why I agreed to do this again,” Sam yelled.

Steve sighed, turning to Vision. “Just imagine that you want to get the tent up as quickly as possible, no matter where you are.”

He stepped away from Sam and Vision and looked back over toward Wanda and Rhodes. Wanda’s was staring at Sam with a look of concentration on her face. “Get out of my head, lady. Just tell me what you need me to do.” 

Well, Steve thought, she wasn’t technically using telekinesis.

It was a long day.

Steve sat on his bed, the lights off in his room, trying to put the day’s failures behind him.

He just wasn’t cut out for this kind of a leadership role, he thought, lowering his head to rest in his hands. 

“So that’s it then?” he imagined a voice in his head saying. “You just give up?”

Even though Peggy had passed away before he was found, even though he knew he would never see her again, he often imagined how their conversations would go, especially when he was low.

“No, I don’t give up, but there are some things that I'm just not able to do. Everyone has their strengths; putting a team together just obviously isn’t one of mine. Look at what a mess I made of the original Avengers, always falling apart before they were even together.”

Maybe someone like Thor, who shared his ideals, but didn’t seem to set everyone (or at least Tony) off in the same way, could do better. Someone more diplomatic in how they handled conflict.

“And if you aren’t naturally inclined to it? In fact, let’s say you're naturally rotten at it. Is that the end of the story? With all your intelligence, all your self-discipline, determination, with your good heart, you can’t get a little better at it? You can’t make them a team overnight, of course, nor should you expect to. But you can’t manage to come up with one single idea of something they could do that would make them work just a little bit more like a team?”

Peggy was right as always. She was, she had always been, the voice in his head telling him to do better.

He would try again tomorrow.

****

1943

Steve's coffee and Peggy's professed liking for it had become a little joke between the two of them. Whether in the field or back at the SSR offices, whenever the opportunity arose, Peggy delighted in introducing Steve’s coffee to anyone who had never had it before.

A fresh-faced young British officer had recently joined the SSR, and Peggy was about to brief him on some of the office’s security protocols. But she stopped by the coffee pot first. Steve was sitting nearby, reading a report.

“Lieutenant, help yourself to a cup of coffee. Captain Rogers made it.”

The lieutenant poured himself a cup, smiling, and took a big gulp of coffee. He forced it down, his eyes watering. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, then sat down quickly.

Peggy didn’t let him off the hook. “Don’t you think the coffee’s excellent, lieutenant?”

“Yes, quite. I’ve…never tasted anything like it before,” he replied. “I just remembered that I left something at my desk. Excuse me sir, ma’am,” he added, practically sprinting away from them.

She had done this several times already, daring her unsuspecting victims to contradict her praise of the coffee. No one ever did, but the number of people who refused any offer of coffee, or anything else, from her in the future was steadily increasing. 

He wasn't sure why Peggy got such a kick out of it, although he didn't care. Any chance to have any extra personal interaction with her, anything that constituted a private joke between them, or anything that amused her was something that he was more than willing to be involved in. 

The lieutenant would probably not be back for several minutes. Steve got up and asked her why she found it so amusing to see people's reaction to his coffee. She paused for a long moment, looking like she was thinking through it herself for the first time, or wondering how to phrase it. "I suppose it's that people seem so hesitant to say what they're thinking. They can't tell ‘Captain America’ that his coffee is abysmal.” 

“You never seem to have any problem telling me what you're thinking,” he said, locking eyes with her. 

She took a step closer to him, her voice low, as she said, “That's because when I look at you, I just see Steve Rogers.” Then she turned on her heel and headed to her desk.

He stood there for a moment, looking after her. The way she said his name gave him goosebumps.

****

2015

The team's distaste for his coffee gave him the idea. A team needed to know they could rely on each other, and they needed to be able to obey orders, to follow the chain of command. So he had set up a schedule for various kitchen tasks, including making coffee every morning. 

Everyone had a day assigned to them on which it was their job to wake up early and make coffee. Sam was the only one who had been able to follow the system without a problem. Wanda said that she wasn’t interested in participating as she preferred tea. Natasha was often nowhere to be found, and never had a serious explanation. Vision got off on tangents, researching the best methods but not considering that a single Chemex did not make enough coffee for everyone. Rhodes probably would have cooperated, but he was off on government missions as often as he was with the Avengers. 

No one understood the point, which was to make it for everyone else, not because you wanted to or needed to, but to show the rest of the team you were there for them.

****

London, 1943

He knocked on the door of her private quarters very early on the morning after she had marked up his shield with bullets. He had wanted to apologize that same day, but after she shot at him, he had thought he had better give her a minimum of 24 hours to cool off.

She opened the door, still wearing a robe. “What are you doing here?” she asked. She was clearly still mad at him, really mad, not even trying to hide it under icy professional courtesies as she usually did when she was upset.

“I came to apologize,” he said simply, having decided that the direct approach was best. “Can I come in for just one minute, please?”

She didn't say anything, but stepped aside and gestured him in, poking her head into the hallway and looking both ways to make sure that no one had seen him before she closed the door.

She stood there just looking at him, her arms crossed over her chest, another sign that she was really angry. Even though she was in a robe, he was the one who felt exposed and embarrassed.

“I'm so sorry about what happened yesterday. She caught me unawares—“

Peggy started to interrupt him but he continued.

“--And that's the reason for what happened, but it's not an excuse. There's no excuse for my behavior, either for what happened or for what I said to you afterwards about Howard. I think that your relationship to him, and everyone else you work with, is 100% professional, and always has been. All I can say is that I'm an idiot, and I'm really sorry.”

“Anything else?” she asked. She was trying not to give in, but he could hear that her tone had softened.

“I brought you some coffee,” he said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small thermos. “And some milk,” he said, pulling out a glass pint.

“Fresh milk!” she said, delighted. “How did you get your hands on that?”

“I have my sources,” he said, not trying to entirely hide how pleased he was with himself, but trying to tone down the smile that spread across his face. She had forgiven him, but of course she had not forgotten what had happened.

She considered the thermos of coffee and pint of milk on the small table for a moment. He stared at them to, not wanting to meet her eyes quite yet. “I accept your apology,” she said finally, after the longest thirty seconds of his life.

Steve breathed a sigh of relief. Peggy didn't say anything she didn't mean. If she accepted his apology, the matter really was settled.

Another long pause ensued. Peggy eyed him, her expression unreadable. “Would you like to stay and have some coffee with me?” she finally asked.

Steve agreed immediately. This was going even better than he had hoped, which would make it easier to tell her the other thing he had come there to say.

She found two teacups and they sat down a little apart on her small bed. He watched as she poured a very generous amount of milk into her coffee. In fact, she put more milk than coffee into the cup. “I was right,” she said, “It's just perfect with a little milk.”

If the occasion had been different, he might have teased her about how much milk she had to use to make his coffee drinkable, but he felt that he was still on thin ice with her. And besides, there was something else he wanted to tell her, if he could keep his nerve. He took a large gulp of coffee. He drank his black. It was perfect. He still didn't know why everyone complained about it. 

“Peggy, I...I know the matter's settled, but I just want to say that I couldn't live with myself if you thought that what happened yesterday meant anything to me.” 

“You said that I still didn’t know how to talk to women, and you’re right. But I don’t want to learn to talk to women; I only want to learn how to talk to you.”

She looked at him, her expression softening for real this time.

“I don't ever want to be a soldier like you said, making time with different girls.” He paused. “There's only one woman for me.” He looked at her meaningfully. 

“And there's something else. I didn't really say anything to you the other night when you came by the pub, and I just want to say that I'd very much like to take you dancing sometime and…” He rose slightly from his seat on the bed and went down on one knee in front of her on the floor. Taking her hand in his, and forcing himself to keep his voice steady, he continued, “I’d like to make coffee for you every morning, if you'd like that, for the rest of our lives.”

“Do you really mean that?” she asked.

“Every word,” he answered.

“All right,” she replied quietly and almost immediately, as if it had been any mundane request, and not a proposal.

“Really? Yes?”

“If that's not the answer you wanted, then why did you ask the question, darling?”

“Oh, that's the answer I wanted. I just can't believe it.”

You can believe it, she said, pulling him back up next to her and leaning in to kiss him. It was worlds different from what had passed between him and the other girl. Sweet and intimate and full of the promise of every kind of kiss they would give each other over a lifetime. He erased the other incident from his memory; he would always consider this his first real kiss, the only one that mattered.

And just like that, it was settled.

They were married shortly thereafter. It had to be kept completely secret for Peggy’s safety. If their relationship were public knowledge, she could become a target to be used against him. For that reason, Phillips had been against the whole idea, but Steve had absolutely insisted. If he were to die, he wanted Peggy to be taken care of, at least financially.

There was no celebration, no congratulations. Steve, Bucky, Howard, and Peggy had been called into Phillip’s office, supposedly for an emergency briefing. Steve and Peggy walked out married, with no one the wiser. The rings they exchanged were taken off before they left the office; Peggy wore both of them on a chain around her neck. She told him later that sometimes it seemed like a dream. When he was away, the feel of the little circles of metal against her chest was the only proof that she had that it had happened.

****

December 2015

All of this had brought him to this moment. Jet-lagged, irritable, and standing with an empty coffee pot in his hand. He thought that things had been going ok with the schedule, but they hadn't expected him back this morning. As soon as he wasn't there, their discipline went out the window. This experiment at team building had been an unqualified disaster.

He was mad at them, himself, and the world in general. He was trying to live a life he was never meant to, and it was going about as well as one would expect. He hadn't wanted to be a hero and a leader; he had just wanted to do his part. When the war was over he just wanted to go home and build a life with Peggy.

Steve called them in and blew up. There was no other word for it. He read them the riot act. No discipline, no thought for the rest of the team. The minute no one was there to watch them, they did as they pleased.

Wanda had tried to interrupt him several times. Finally, his little speech over, he let her speak. “I didn't make coffee this morning because the power was out on this entire side of the building. Tony's here and something happened in his lab. So I went down to the office levels and used their coffeemaker, and then brought the coffee up here. See the carafe on the table. Everyone's already had breakfast. I should have left you a note. I'm sorry.”

Steve felt smaller than he had been even before the serum. Would he ever learn to think before he opened his damn mouth? He apologized, then said he was jet-lagged, then apologized again. They accepted it with good grace and dispersed. 

Natasha lingered. “You know that they've made a lot of progress, don't you? And that they respect you?”

“Thanks,” he said flatly, shifting the sections of the newspaper around on the table in front of him. “What's Tony up to here?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

“Who knows? I asked him, but all he would say was that it involved inter-dimensional and potentially world-ending consequences.”

“The usual, then,” he said.

“The usual,” Natasha confirmed.

He went back to his room, but was too irritated to sleep. At this point he wasn’t even sure who he irritated with. Himself, the team, the fact that it was Christmas and he was alone in a room as spartan as any military barracks. Probably all of it. After a run in the freezing cold and reading for a while, he did finally fall asleep.

He didn’t know how long it had been or what time it was when the intercom sounded in his room, waking him. It was Tony wanting him to talk to him down in his lab. He supposed Tony had heard about him losing his temper and was going to needle him about it. 

“Tony, I'm tired. I don't have time for this today.” 

“Yes you do. Just get down here or I'll come up there.”

Steve knew that wasn't an idle threat, and he definitely didn't want Tony in his room. At least he could leave the lab; in his room he would be trapped. 

He walked the hallways, resigned. Whatever it was Tony wanted, he was sure he wouldn't like it. When he arrived at the lab, Tony was waiting at the door, an even worse sign. 

“What is it?” he asked shortly.

“Just promise me you won't freak out.”

“Please tell me that I won't have any reason to,” he replied, his lips drawing to a thin line.

Tony paused, for once uncertain of what he wanted to say.

“What’s going on, Tony?”

“Well, you know it’s Christmas, and this is always tough this time of year because it’s when my parents died, and it’s just that I've been trying to work through some issues, about my dad, and things, and so I was...kind of thinking that it would be nice to be able to talk to him about some things and so I’ve been experimenting with a little bit of…time travel using some of the data that Vision got from Ultron and the stone, and, there was a small, not even small, minuscule really, miscalculation on my part and ...I can't really explain it. Just go in my office..... And don't freak out.”

Steve wanted to punch a hole into Tony's office instead of going through the door. With everything they had been through only months ago, with everything it had cost them to defeat Ultron, Tony had learned nothing. But there was no point in worrying about that just now. He had to deal with whatever was in the office. Apparently whatever had happened wasn't an immediate threat, or he would have called the whole team, and he certainly wouldn't have just told Steve to walk in there. He took a deep breath, crossed the room, and opened the door to Tony's office...to see a young woman standing with her back to him. She had rich brown hair that fell just below her shoulders. She was wearing a dark suit. It looked just like...it couldn't possibly be...

Peggy Carter heard the door open and turned. 

“Steve?” she said with astonishment. 

He crossed the room in two strides and almost knocked her off her feet with the force of his greeting. He hugged her to him, lifting her off her feet, and thank God she wrapped her arms around him too. 

“When?” he asked her. 

“1947,” she answered. 

Tony had run a few tests on her to make sure she wasn’t suffering any ill effects from whatever had brought her to the present. He had wanted to do a lot more, but Steve couldn’t wait any longer to be alone with her.

But once they were finally back in his room, he realized that he had no idea whether Peggy still wanted him the same way he wanted her.

She was seated on his bed, looking perplexed. He sat down next to her, as nervous as he had once been proposing. “Peggy, I don’t really know how to ask you this. I know it’s been years, and you thought I was dead, and…do you want to stay here with me? Is there—Are you…”

“Is there someone else? Is that what you want to ask me?”

He nodded, and looked down at his hands.

She reached over and lifted his chin up gently so that he had no choice but to look her in the eyes. She removed her fingers from under her chin She slipped them inside the neckline of her blouse, drawing out a long chain, on the end of which were two gold wedding rings.

“Does this answer your question?”

It did. He wrapped himself around her, kissing her, her mouth as hot and sweet as he remembered. 

He woke early the next morning, but not because of jet lag, or habit. He had panicked for a fraction of a second that it had all been a dream, but there she was, alive and warm, with a pillow half over her head and one leg sticking out of the blanket at an awkward angle, just like she always slept.

He watched her for a while, only able to tear himself away so that he could bring her breakfast. He worked quickly, tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for the toaster to ding. He didn’t want to risk not being there when she woke up.

He came quietly back into the room with her breakfast tray, setting it on the nightstand. She was still sleeping soundly. He got back into bed and propped himself up on one arm. He watched her breathing in and out. She stirred after a few minutes. She slowly opened her eyes and reached over to stroke his cheek.

“I made you breakfast,” he said, nodding toward the tray.

She sat up halfway and smiled.

“Plenty of milk in the coffee, just like you like,” he added.

She yawned and picked up the cup, taking a long sip. “Lovely,” she said.

“You know, I still don’t know whether to believe you when you say you like my coffee,” he said, reaching over and sliding his arm around her shoulder. He marveled that minutes and hours were passing and she was still here, still real. This was really happening. He was starting to feel secure enough that he could tease her a little.

She set the cup down so she could snuggle close to him, her head on his chest. “Your coffee isn't perfect, darling, but it's perfect for me, just like you are.”

That was all the answer he needed.

**Author's Note:**

> “g.d. pot of coffee” Even in internal monologue, Steve watches his language.
> 
> “the voice in his head telling him to do better” Stolen gratefully from the 2002 movie _Two Weeks Notice_


End file.
